On Carbuncles, Battalions and Crows: Choice Words in Alibaba’s Fakes Fight With Beijing

When a Chinese agency accusedAlibaba Group in a white paper of allowing fakes, bribery and other misdeeds on its Taobao marketplace, it did more than shake up investors. It also threw the spotlight on a slew of colorful words exchanged by Alibaba and officials at the State Administration for Industry and Commerce. One example: Lingering problems at Alibaba, according to SAIC, caused “a neglected carbuncle to become the bane of its life.”

The white paper unveiled by SAIC on Wednesday is no longer on the agency’s site. A press official at the agency said she didn’t know why. Still, other releases from Alibaba’s founder, Executive Chairman Jack Ma, from Taobao and from official media show the words continue to be as colorful as the story:

From the SAIC white paper:

In addition to the remark about the carbuncle, the SAIC white paper also expressed concerns over Alibaba’s general attitude:

“Watch the bottom line. Overcome an arrogant state of mind.”

A meeting with Alibaba in July, it said, helped the company “wake up from its narcissism, urged them to earnestly raise attention to the seriousness of the problem and to speed up their sense of urgency about adopting measures to improve.”

Taobao responded Wednesday with a statement lambasting a top SAIC official, Liu Hongliang, for “procedural misconduct during the supervision process, irrational enforcement of the law and obtaining a biased conclusion using the wrong methodology has inflicted irreparable and serious damage to Taobao and Chinese online businesses.”

From Mr. Ma:

Late Wednesday, Taobao on its official Weibo site posted a second response to the SAIC white paper, this one signed by Mr. Ma. It mentions an anti-fakery battalion, injustices and Taobao’s status as a major platform that is always under scrutiny for potential fakes:

“Taobao announced that it has set up a 300-member ‘anti-fake special warfare battalion’ and will continue to recruit people throughout the whole country to ally with the governments, intellectual property rights holders and consumers to cooperate and interact offline. It will take advantage of big data to crack down of counterfeits, linking together all of society’s power to solve longstanding problems regarding fakes.”

“Taobao is destined to bear this injustice, this responsibility. Taobao has to accept it, and solve it.”

“To solve the problems of counterfeits and intellectual property is to solve the problems of Taobao’s existence. [Solving] social problems cannot rely on one single company or one single platform. We must use all manners of recourse and all our power, and do it through social co-governance rather than act independently and make accusations at each other. “

From Taobao:

On Tuesday, the day before the SAIC posted its white paper, Taobao posted on its Weibo account a reply to an earlier report from the agency that said it found fakes on Taobao. The report was credited to an employee who didn’t offer a name, but identified him- or herself as a “post-80s” (meaning young) Taobao employee:

The agency “succeeded in proving just how unsafe and unreliable online shopping in China is, just how crafty the several millions of online retailers are, just how blind and stupid its 500 million consumers are, and how Chinese manufacturing is blacker than the crows in the sky.”

“We can accept your god-like existence, but what we don’t understand is how there can be different standards and a god-like logic in your numerous samples and reports.”

“I believe no one else will be able to stand up and tell you how wrong and ridiculous you are, how absurd the things you’ve done have been, and how deeply you’ve damaged the overall credibility of the several tens of thousands of law-enforcing colleagues of yours in the SAIC.”